At the end of the 1980s design and development of an information and network system started for the Chemical Engineering Faculty of the TU Budapest. Our aim was to provide computer aided communication for departments, administration and students of the faculty. Since its beginnings the development has gone through many phases, concerning both the applied software technologies and the range of features offered by the system. The original system has been created for DOS, using Novell file servers and concurrently accessed dBase database. As the system grew from being a specialised program for the faculty into a more complete solution for all faculties of our university our next goal was to increase the security provided by the program. This was achieved by implementing a special client server architecture. In the following phase, work has begun to convert the working system to an Oracle database accessed by client programs written for MS Windows in Delphi. We discuss the stages of this project through the features offered by the system, the chemical research and education methodology changed by the information technology and the software engineering technologies applied in the system.